For Christmas this year I decided that since neither Pat nor I were heading over to Australia that it would be nice to spend Christmas day cooking and relaxing. We had started planning the event weeks before – with me choosing the menu and Pat running around getting the ingredients in the lead up to today’s event (and there’s no way I will forget that he had to get up at 5am yesterday morning to hit Smithfield’s to get the meat for our meal!)

Our celebration started with Christmas Eve when Pat cooked up some yummy ribs. We’re both suckers for it and he prepared two styles of rib for us to sample. They cooked for a few hours so by the time we got our teeth into them they were nice and tender and juicy. Eaten whilst watching DVDs it was a perfect lead up to events today!

We woke up quite early on Christmas morning and after wishing each other a Merry Christmas we got online to speak with the Family in Oz. Its geeky I know but we were going to broadcast what we could of our cooking and preparation whilst it was still Oz waking hours.

Our menu read like this:

Starters
– Seared scallops wrapped in crispy bacon
– Curried parsnip and apple soup with home-made parsnip crisps. Recipe courtesy of Delia.

Mains
– Roasted belly of pork with crackling
– Baked pheasant stuffed and seasoned with sea salt and lemon thyme

Sides
– Garlic and herb roasted sweet potato wedges
– Fresh herbed-chicken stuffing
– Brussel Sprouts

Desserts
– Mini baked ginger cheesecake
– Pavlova served with generous lashings of strawberry and passionfruit

A lot of food right!?!

The day of cooking started at around noon with preparation of the cheesecakes and parsnip soup. Between preparation, waiting for the soup to be set, speaking to the fam back home in Oz it was just under two hours later before we sat down to enjoy the soup. It was delicious and actually I think my favourite dish of the day!

Soon after we finished guzzling down the soup we put the pork belly into the oven to start its five hour journey to something soft, tender, juicy and ready for our bellies! Ha ha. Whilst we waited for the pork belly to be readied we ate the scallops, downed some sorbet (which Pat made using his ice cream machine) and entertained ourselves with a few DVDs. Fantastic!

We also started to prepare the pheasant for the oven. I volunteered to chop the ingredients for the stuffing and so Pat had to prepare the pheasant. It’s a very gamy bird and bought extremely fresh from the market was quite bloody and even had a few feathers still to pluck. Lucky Pat got this job!

Finally our pork belly was ready and after plating we were ready to chow down.

Oh boy, after the pork belly I was more than ready for bed! I was so stuffed but we still had pheasant and two desserts to go! Phew. In the end I couldn’t finish much of the pheasant but of course downed all the cheesecake and pavlova. Who could overlook dessert! We even finished with yet another sorbet.

And that, folks, is how to have a Christmas meal in ten hours. It was just past 10pm when we were done and dusted. Hard work but I had a fabulous time.